Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has been doing some sleuthing around the BBC’s latest crisis.
Rusbridger told a British Screen Forum (BSF) audience today that he just got hold of the controversial Panorama film that spliced together two Donald Trump clips. He showed it to former New York Times exec editor Bill Keller to see what he made of the film, which has caused the exits of Director General Tim Davie and his news boss along with a $1B legal threat from Trump.
“Bill had just written a piece which said this was a program that was largely pro-Trump, it was largely an attempt to explain Trump and why it seemed likely that he was going to win that election,” said Rusbridger, who edited the left-leaning Guardian for two decades. “It wasn’t a hatchet job on Trump. It was a 12-second edit that was a way of jumping to a new sequence. That doesn’t seem to me like an ideological attack on the right, it feels to me like a clumsy edit, but those are the standards to which BBC journalism are now held.”
The Panorama is no longer available on BBC iPlayer, was never available in the U.S. and has been ditched by distributor Blue Ant Media. The controversial clip in the Panorama titled Trump: A Second Chance made it appear Trump was inciting riot and was discussed twice at an internal BBC editorial standards committee before being revealed to the public via the excoriating Prescott memo in Guardian rival The Daily Telegraph.
“Farage-proofing” the BBC
Rusbridger said there is a “completely irrational vendetta against the BBC,” “a pathological hatred that comes out in some quarters that I find very strange.” He was delivering a keynote about the BBC that was supposed to be given by Davie before his resignation.
With charter renewal coming up, at which point the BBC funding model will likely be overhauled, Rusbridger said the BBC now has three years to “Farage proof” before the next general election, at which point Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party may unseat the governing Labour Party. Farage, a friend of Trump’s, has made his distaste for the BBC known and has called the license fee funding model “completely unacceptable.” Speaking before Rusbridger today, UK Culture Minister Ian Murray said much of the British public would now prefer to watch Fox News over BBC News.
Rusbridger has been a vociferous critic of Robbie Gibb, the BBC board member and former Conservative Party spin doctor whose name has been connected over the past fortnight with a potential coup to oust Turness, reveal the Prescott memo to the public and slowly move the BBC’s coverage to the right. Gibb’s allies and the BBC have squarely denied this notion.
Rusbridger said today that Gibb wielded “enormous power” as the only member of the five-person editorial standards committee with an editorial background. The BBC’s governance therefore needs a “redesign” from government, he added.
Gibb will appear in front of the influential Culture, Media & Sport Committee next week alongside BBC chair Samir Shah and Prescott.
